Quenelle Shaping

Quenelle shaping molds a soft food into a smooth, egg-like oval using two spoons, a technique that grew out of the classic French quenelle dish, a creamed fish or meat mixture bound with egg and formed into that same shape before cooking. By extension, cooks now apply the same two-spoon shaping method to other soft foods purely for presentation, most often ice cream, sorbet, butter or mashed potato, to give a plated dish a neat, elegant oval form without cooking anything further.